Saturday, October 21, 2006

A New Moon, An Old Tune—Making Tracks with Jack

Aaah, the cosmic alignment of moon, tides, weather, and day of the week has brought me a Saturday afternoon low tide, new moon (meaning low, low tides), and a mild Santana condition (meaning sparkling sun, low humidity, and summer-like temperatures). The confluence of these conditions means I cannot resist a run on “my” beach. Although the weather says summer, I know that it’s really fall because the life guard tower, present all summer long, is now gone. And, I can easily park near the beach even though it’s Saturday afternoon. The warm weather has brought out more than the normal beach lovers, but nowhere near the numbers that summer Saturdays produce. The wide beach means more sand for all of us: frisbee players, sunbathers, walkers, and runners.I’ve started taking my Nano along and today it’s In Between Dreams (Jack Johnson). Jack’s good to run to. His percussion is prominent but not overpowering. It gives you your own metronome and lets you ease into your pace with the rhythm feeding your head. Plus, Jack’s music is just damn happy. Even when he’s singing about death (If I Could) “They say that new life makes losing life easier to understand” and being burned out (Breakdown) “I hope this old train breaks down then I could take a walk around,” his guitar and his voice are hopeful and up.

Hey, how do you spot the tourists on the beach? (This is a summer question, no doubt, but it feels like summer today.) My favorite summertime beach game is “Watch the Clueless Beach Loungers Get Inundated by the Incoming Tide.” I know this sounds rather elitist, but hey, it’s not elitist, it’s just local knowledge taking advantage of, well, non-local knowledge. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched groups laying on their towels or sitting in their beach chairs totally unaware that, yes, Martha, the waves do seem to becoming closer as time goes by. Oh, but the sand here is dry, and, well, it was dry when we got here, and wha? Martha! My towel! It’s wet! Did you see that wave? It came up to my towel? Quick, Johnny, grab the towel and the camera and the food and the chair, let’s move everything back one whole foot!

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About Me

My daytime job is a researcher and writer of Enterprise Java, web applications, and tools. And I will slice into the tangled web of technology in this blog from time to time. But there are other areas that I enjoy writing about too, as you can see.